Adobe were a little self aware post Steve Jobs anti Flash rant but not defensive at this year’s webDU conference. Why? Because Flash continues to improve and there are few haters in the webDU crowd. Gone was the spiel about the quick uptake of flash and flash penetration in the market place. The emphasis this year was on performance improvements in Flash beta 10.1. Expect more fan fare after the official release later this year.
Flash 10.1 beta talking points:
touch apis
improved audio support
performance improvements
Flash mobile applications run on various platforms and devices.
App stores for flash developers on these platforms are more open to developers than you-know-who.
The touch capabilities of Flash were best illustrated by this video, developed by Struck Axiom, that I crudely caught on my camera.
I have been to 4 webDU conferences and this was the first year that I was not on the Daemon organising team. It felt strange to not have to do anything but enjoy myself, and that I did.
In the Day 1 keynote Mike Chambers from Adobe came out at the gates in defense of Flash (hi Mr Jobs). Acknowledging how CPU intensive flash video can be he spoke of Flash performance improvements on mobile and the desktop. He also demoed the new flash touch apis on tablets, phones and larger screens. Microsoft were there and to the delight of many brought along a Microsoft Surface. It was a blast to play with. It was interesting to hear from Shane Morris about what constraints were put into the behaviour of the Surface. In his talk Shane outlined design principles with case studies of applications designed for ANZ, Lonely Planet and Cochlear. This was my highlight of the conference. Other more technical sessions that I did not attend talked more specifically about touch technologies e.g. Dmitry Baranovskiy demonstrated the gestural capability of his Raphael javascript library.
The aim of the interview series UX Studies, is to look at and discuss the education paths people have taken to skill up for their career in the user experience field.
The idea for the series came about after friends, looking to change career focus, asked me about what they should study. Unfortunately for them, I am not the best person to ask, because, like some in the industry, I have no directly related formal qualifications.
I think it’s important that the disciplines, skills and theory behind user experience be clearly articulated for those looking to enter the field and for those, like me, already in the field looking to expand their knowledge base.
I hope too, that the professionals that cross paths with UX practioners such as developers and business analysts come across this series and find it of some use.
Interviews will be based on the following questions:
Focal Attractions are the publishers of Mumbrella, an online magazine for media and marketing news. They revealed in the MX rag yesterday that they plan to put a clause, claiming ownership of tweets, in employees contracts. The reason why is because:
an employee’s work-identified posts fell somewhere between their little black book and the firm’s email database … they should belong to the company … so a worker could not take all the followers they had built up using the firm’s identity to a competitor.
Click for a larger image.
Tim Burrowes, co-owner and editor cited this example:
“With Rove, he has got loads of followers and when he leaves Ten they’ll all go with him”
I’m not sure this is the best example that Burrowes could have used. Rove has his own production company and his content is licensed to Ten.
The article articulates the role and value of the front end web developer and spurns a debate of sorts in the comments (now closed) between the generalists and the specialists.
Will Peavey’s comment cuts close to the bone, (mine specifically!) when he says:
“I think being a front-end dev should be a prerequisite to doing IA/UX work. In my experience I’ve seen lots of IA/UX/Usability “experts” that come from art school or academic backgrounds, and attempt to design interfaces that look good as Photoshop mockups, but fail in the browser.”
Ah yes, I must confess to 4 years of art school, and only rudimentary and increasingly fading HTML/CSS skills.
May 21 and 22 was the 7th webDU and my 3rd as part of the Daemon team who organise the event. WebDU is a technology conference, primarily but not solely, focused on developers. Amongst all the code and whiz bang-ery this year was an entire track dedicated to the consulting and planning side of projects: Team/UX (user experience). The room was packed for the whole two days.
As a non developer, the theme I took away from webDU 2009 was prototyping. Delivering prototypes be it a wireframe or design, that are closer to the final web page or web application.
Both Adobe and Microsoft debuted products at webDU. Steven Heintz of Adobe talked up the re-branded Flash Catalyst. Anyone familiar with the Creative Suite can now deliver interactive wireframes and designs to developers. As Steven put it in the keynote Flash Calatyst seeks to “make interaction more of a design experience“.
At an IA-Peers Sydney meet up this week I discussed what it is that I do as a web producer. The group also chatted about the job titles Information Architect and Experience Architect. Anyone in this industry will know that job titles change all the time. This is something I would like to cover in this blog; speak to other professionals and get them to define their job title.
I thought I would start with my job title: Producer. For this post I am republishing an email I sent in September 2008 to a student of a friend who teaches Online Journalism at UTS.
Hi Exxx
Here is a little run down for your student who is interested in being a web producer.
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